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    Pfsense goes down every morning

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • M
      mecheng70
      last edited by

      Will get those logs when I get back to the house. Is there a better way than cut and paste the logs. I assume that I will have to increase the display limits inorder to get all the information.

      Here is the hardware:
      Qotom Q Series Mini PC Q190S-S02  - j1900 quad core 2.42 GHz, 4GB RAM

      Am I sure about Charter? They said no. When pfsense was down, i could get my laptop to connect to the internet when directly plugged into cable modem.

      I will disable upnp and see what that does tomorrow am.

      Appreciate it.

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      • luckman212L
        luckman212 LAYER 8
        last edited by

        @mecheng70:

        Is there a better way than cut and paste the logs.

        clog /var/system.log >systemlog.txt
        scp that file to your machine, or if your terminal has a big enough buffer you can just dump it to the console and copy/paste

        i could get my laptop to connect to the internet when directly plugged into cable modem.

        so you're double-NAT'ing then? That's not good- your modem should be bridged. If you can plug your laptop right in and get DHCP/NAT then you're not set up properly. Charter (all major residential ISPs really) will lie or make up stories to blame everything on the stupid customer. Which is one of the reasons pfSense is so great (if it's in bridge mode) because it actually monitors the connection and provides visible evidence to show them…

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        • GertjanG
          Gertjan
          last edited by

          Well, for myself I can't say that double NAT is unstable. Works for weeks or months in a row for me.
          Btw, some ISP router can't be put in bridge mode

          It looks to me if the WAN_DHCP interface goes down entirely. What is this interface ? A Realtek thing ? A USB dongle ?

          When the connection (WAN) is down, and you unplug - replug the cable, do you find it signaled in the log ?

          No "help me" PM's please. Use the forum, the community will thank you.
          Edit : and where are the logs ??

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          • M
            mecheng70
            last edited by

            Here are the files.  they are attachments versus pastebin.  (Is that ok?)

            FYI - turned upnp off

            system.txt
            gateways.txt
            dhcpd.txt
            routing.txt

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            • M
              mecheng70
              last edited by

              @Gertjan:

              It looks to me if the WAN_DHCP interface goes down entirely. What is this interface ? A Realtek thing ? A USB dongle ?

              When the connection (WAN) is down, and you unplug - replug the cable, do you find it signaled in the log ?

              not sure I understand your question about the interface?  "What is the interface?" I do not know what IP address that is… It is not my public IP address.  (it is out the scope of my knowledge)

              see attached for plug and unpluged the cable... it was unplugged for 10-15 seconds at Sep 30 15:11:09...  it does not seem to indicate in the gateway logs that it was plugged back in.

              [gateways unpluged.txt](/public/imported_attachments/1/gateways unpluged.txt)

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              • M
                mecheng70
                last edited by

                Now the system slowly went down.  The dashboard is claiming that I am offline. No IP for the WAN.

                I am at a loss.

                Thoughts?

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                • H
                  Harvy66
                  last edited by

                  He's asking what the physical interface is. What brand NIC and possible which model. A cheap NIC is like using crappy fuel in a high performance car. Just by looking at the forums, the number one cause of issues is crappy NICs.

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                  • M
                    mecheng70
                    last edited by

                    The NIC is physical NIC in the Qotom mini PC.  Not sure of the brand. It is mounted on the mini PC motherboard.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • H
                      Harvy66
                      last edited by

                      That model has Realtek NICs, which may be the cause. Hard to say. realtek is hit and miss. Some work, some don't at all, and some in-between. The NIC is the single most important part of a firewall.

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                      • P
                        PiBa
                        last edited by

                        The re0 interface is flapping like crazy..
                        Is the nic directly connected to a modem? perhaps try putting a little switch in between? Or setting a fixed network link speed? Tried with a different cable?

                        Below a subset of the system logging this go's on for a while until the reboot happens it seems.. With this happening there is little chance it will work properly at that time.. And afaik a link state change should normally only be logged due to physically removing/plugging-in the cable, or when there is some big trouble on or close to the physical layer..

                        
                        	Line 19: Sep 30 08:49:43 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to UP
                        	Line 43: Sep 30 08:49:49 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN
                        	Line 57: Sep 30 08:49:53 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to UP
                        	Line 150: Sep 30 08:50:04 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN
                        	Line 163: Sep 30 08:50:08 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to UP
                        	Line 229: Sep 30 08:50:17 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN
                        	Line 248: Sep 30 08:50:21 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to UP
                        	Line 287: Sep 30 08:50:28 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN
                        	Line 294: Sep 30 08:50:32 SexyEpicRouter kernel: re0: link state changed to UP
                        

                        My 2 cents..

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                        • M
                          mecheng70
                          last edited by

                          @PiBa:

                          The re0 interface is flapping like crazy..
                          Is the nic directly connected to a modem? perhaps try putting a little switch in between? Or setting a fixed network link speed? Tried with a different cable?

                          i did try a different cable and there wasn't any difference.

                          changed both WAN and LAN to "1000baseT <full-duplex>" from autoselect… maybe that will calm things down. although had to reboot the router becuase it lost the WAN gateway.

                          before rebooting, Also noticed that under services "unbound" is not started... there were errors regarding the unbound.  tried to restart the service but to no avail.

                          I went ahead and purchased a dual intel nic mini pc to replace this one since the wife works from home and i need to get this up and running.. we will see what that does the network on monday night.</full-duplex>

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                          • M
                            mecheng70
                            last edited by

                            Sunday morning and with the cable change and other items mentioned about (upnp and Nat), the network is at a crawl.
                            The status dashboard says that it is online.  An public IP address is displayed. Oh and zero loss.

                            All web pages are timing out if they can get through.

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                            • P
                              PiBa
                              last edited by

                              What happens with a 'ping 8.8.8.8 -t' on a workstation command-line. And a 'ping google.com' ?
                              What do the logfiles say today? Are there still link UP/DOWN or other messages in system log? Or unbound showing errors in dns log?
                              Are all status/services running?

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • luckman212L
                                luckman212 LAYER 8
                                last edited by

                                @mecheng70:

                                I went ahead and purchased a dual intel nic mini pc to replace this one since the wife works from home and i need to get this up and running.. we will see what that does the network on monday night.

                                Hope that solves this for you. Let us know

                                I came up with this filter to sift thru your system log a bit…

                                cat system.txt | cut -b 32- | sed -E -e 's/\[[0-9]+(:[0-9]+)?\]//g' -e 's/cookie\ is\ [0-9]+/cookie/g' -e 's/PIDS?:\ [0-9]+/PID_XXX/g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
                                

                                Shows 75 link down/up events on the NIC in a 6 hour timespan. That is definitely going to cause major issues no matter what, so you've got to stabilize that.

                                other comments – do you absolutely need avahi? If not, disable it. Same goes for pfBlocker. It's a great package but, at least until you have this problem sorted out, may make it harder to troubleshoot.

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                                • M
                                  mecheng70
                                  last edited by

                                  @luckman212:

                                  I came up with this filter to sift thru your system log a bit…

                                  cat system.txt | cut -b 32- | sed -E -e 's/\[[0-9]+(:[0-9]+)?\]//g' -e 's/cookie\ is\ [0-9]+/cookie/g' -e 's/PIDS?:\ [0-9]+/PID_XXX/g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
                                  

                                  Shows 75 link down/up events on the NIC in a 6 hour timespan. That is definitely going to cause major issues no matter what, so you've got to stabilize that.

                                  other comments – do you absolutely need avahi? If not, disable it. Same goes for pfBlocker. It's a great package but, at least until you have this problem sorted out, may make it harder to troubleshoot.

                                  thanks for the script… I will not get to it tonight.  funny thing is that Charter admitted that the area was having problems.  Your handy script had the 75 up/downs to 8 in the last 12 hours.  so that is an improvement.  I am going to switch the hardware (with intel NICs) over this weekend when the wife is out of town.. :)

                                  thanks...

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                                  • ?
                                    Guest
                                    last edited by

                                    What should I be looking for?

                                    In Germany it is common that many of the ISPs are cutting the Internet connection once a day, could this be the
                                    point you should also looking for?

                                    If there is a double NAT situation you could try out to set at the pfSense WAN settings a satic IP address from the
                                    network of the router in front of that pfSense box. Because the DHCP lease will be out after xyz minutes/days/weeks
                                    or so on.

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